Nietzsche - The Greek State

‘The Greek State’ (1871/2)

Preface

We moderns have the advantage over the Greeks with two concepts
given as consolation, as it were, to a world behaving in a thoroughly slave¬
like manner while anxiously avoiding the word ‘slave’: we speak of the
‘dignity of man’ and of the ‘dignity of work’. We struggle wretchedly to
perpetuate a wretched life; this terrible predicament necessitates exhaust¬
ing work which man - or, more correctly - human intellect, seduced by
the ‘will’, now and again admires as something dignified. But to justify
the claim of work to be honoured, existence itself, to which work is simply
a painful means, would, above all, have to have somewhat more dignity
and value placed on it than appears to have been the case with serious-
minded philosophies and religions up till now. What can we find, in the
toil and moil of all the millions, other than the drive to exist at any price,
the same all-powerful drive which makes stunted plants push their roots
into arid rocks!

Only those individuals can emerge from this horrifying struggle for
existence who are then immediately preoccupied with the fine illusions of
artistic culture, so that they do not arrive at that practical pessimism that
nature abhors as truly unnatural. In the modern world which, compared
with the Greek, usually creates nothing but freaks and centaurs, and
where the individual man is flamboyantly pieced together like the fantas¬
tic creature at the beginning of Horace’s Ars Poetica ,' the greed of the
struggle for existence and of the need for art often manifests itself in one

1 lines 1-5.

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and the same person: an unnatural combination that gave rise to the need
to excuse and consecrate that very greed ahead of the dictates of art. For
that reason, people believe in the ‘dignity of man’ and the ‘dignity of
work’.

The Greeks have no need for conceptual hallucinations like this, they
voice their opinion that work is a disgrace with shocking openness - and
a more concealed, less frequently expressed wisdom, nevertheless alive
everywhere, added that the human being was also a disgraceful and
pathetic non-entity and ‘shadow of a dream ’. 2 Work is a disgrace because
existence has no inherent value: even when this very existence glitters
with the seductive jewels of artistic illusions and then really does seem to
have an inherent value, the pronouncement that work is a disgrace is still
valid - simply because we do not feel it is possible for man, fighting for
sheer survival, to be an artist. Nowadays it is not the man in need of art,
but the slave who determines general views: in which capacity he nat¬
urally has to label all his circumstances with deceptive names in order to
be able to live. Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of work,
are the feeble products of a slavery that hides from itself. These are ill-
fated times when the slave needs such ideas and is stirred up to think
about himself and beyond himself! Ill-fated seducers who have destroyed
the slave’s state of innocence with the fruit of the tree of knowledge! Now
he must console himself from one day to the next with transparent lies the
like of which anyone with deeper insight would recognize in the alleged
‘equal rights for all’ or the ‘fundamental rights of man’, of man as such,
or in the dignity of work. He must be prevented at any cost from realiz¬
ing what stage or level must be attained before ‘dignity’ can even be men¬
tioned, which is actually the point where the individual completely
transcends himself and no longer has to procreate and work in the service
of the continuation of his individual life.

And even at this level of ‘work’, a feeling similar to shame occasionally
overcomes the Greeks. Plutarch says somewhere , 3 with ancient Greek
instinct, that no youth of noble birth would want to be a Phidias himself
when he saw the Zeus in Pisa or a Polyklet when he saw the Hera in
Argos: and would have just as little desire to be Anacreon, Philetas or
Archilochus, however much he delighted in their poetry. Artistic creativ¬
ity, for the Greek, falls into the same category of undignified work as any

2 Pindar, Pythian VIII. 95.

3 ‘Life of Pericles’, ch. 2.

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philistine craft. However, when the compelling force of artistic inspir¬
ation unfolds in him, he has to create and bow to the necessity of work.
And as a father admires his child’s beauty and talent but thinks of the act
of creation with embarrassed reluctance, the Greek did the same. His
pleased astonishment at beauty did not blind him to its genesis - which,
like all genesis in nature, seemed to him a powerful necessity, a thrusting
towards existence. That same feeling that sees the process of procreation
as something shameful, to be hidden, although through it man serves a
higher purpose than his individual preservation: that same feeling also
veiled the creation of the great works of art, although they inaugurate a
higher form of existence, just like that other act inaugurates a new gener¬
ation. Shame , therefore, seems to be felt where man is just a tool of infi¬
nitely greater manifestations of will than he considers himself to be, in his
isolated form as individual.

We now have the general concept for categorizing the feelings the
Greeks had in relation to work and slavery. Both were looked on by them
as a necessary disgrace that aroused the feeling of shame , at the same time
disgrace and necessity. In this feeling of shame there lurks the uncon¬
scious recognition that these conditions are required for the actual goal. In
that necessity lies the horrif ying, predatory aspect of the Sphinx of nature
who, in the glorification of the artistically free life of culture [Kultur], so
beautifully presents the torso of a young woman. Culture [Bildung],
which is first and foremost a real hunger for art, rests on one terrible
premise: but this reveals itself in the nascent feeling of shame. In order
for there to be a broad, deep, fertile soil for the development of art, the
overwhelming majority has to be slavishly subjected to life’s necessity in
the service of the minority, beyond the measure that is necessary for the
individual. At their expense, through their extra work, that privileged
class is to be removed from the struggle for existence, in order to produce
and satisfy a new world of necessities.

Accordingly, we must learn to identify as a cruel-sounding truth the
fact that slavery belongs to the essence of a culture : a truth, granted, that
leaves open no doubt about the absolute value of existence. This truth is
the vulture which gnaws at the liver of the Promethean promoter of
culture. The misery of men living a life of toil has to be increased to make
the production of the world of art possible for a small number of
Olympian men. Here we find the source of that hatred that has been nour¬
ished by the Communists and Socialists as well as their paler descendants,
the white race of ‘Liberals’ of every age against the arts, but also against

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classical antiquity. If culture were really left to the discretion of a people,
if inescapable powers, which are law and restraint to the individual, did
not rule, then the glorification of spiritual poverty and the iconoclastic
destruction of the claims of art would be more than the revolt of the
oppressed masses against drone-like individuals: it would be the cry of
compassion tearing down the walls of culture; the urge for justice, for
equal sharing of the pain, would swamp all other ideas. Actually, an over-
exuberant compassion did break down the flood-gates of cultural life for
a brief period now and then; a rainbow of compassionate love and
peace appeared with the first radiance of Christianity, and beneath it,
Christianity’s most beautiful fruit, the Gospel of St John, was born. But
there are also examples of powerful religions fossilizing certain stages of
culture over long periods of time, and mowing down, with their merciless
sickle, everything that wants to continue to proliferate. For we must not
forget one thing: the same cruelty that we found at the heart of every
culture also lies at the heart of every powerf ul religion, and in the nature
of power in general, which is always evil; so we shall understand the matter
just as well, if a culture breaks down an all too highly raised bulwark of
religious claims with the cry for freedom, or at least justice. Whatever
wants to live, or rather must live, in this horrif ying constellation of things
is quintessential^ a reflection of the primeval pain and contradiction and
must seem, in our eyes, ‘organs made for this world and earth ’, 4 an insa¬
tiable craving for existence and eternal self-contradiction in terms of
time, therefore as becoming. Every moment devours the preceding one,
every birth is the death of countless beings, procreating, living and mur¬
dering are all one. Therefore, we may compare the magnificent culture to
a victor dripping with blood, who, in his triumphal procession, drags the
vanquished along, chained to his carriage as slaves: the latter having been
blinded by a charitable power so that, almost crushed by the wheels of the
chariot, they still shout, ‘dignity of work!’, ‘dignity of man!’ Culture, the
voluptuous Cleopatra, still continues to throw the most priceless pearls
into her golden goblet: these pearls are the tears of compassion for the
slave and the misery of slavery. The enormous social problems of today
are engendered by the excessive sensitivity of modern man, not by true
and deep pity for that misery; and even if it were true that the Greeks
were ruined because they kept slaves, the opposite is even more
certain, that we will be destroyed by the lack of slavery: an activity which

4 Goethe, Faust 11 line 11 <>of>.

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neither the original Christians nor the Germanic tribes found at all objec¬
tionable, let alone reprehensible. What an elevating effect on us is pro¬
duced by the sight of a medieval serf, whose legal and ethical relationship
with his superior was internally sturdy and sensitive, whose narrow exis¬
tence was profoundly cocooned - how elevating - and how reproachful!

Whoever is unable to think about the configuration of society without
melancholy, whoever has learnt to think of it as the continuing, painful
birth of those exalted men of culture in whose service everything else has
to consume itself, will no longer be deceived by that false gloss the
moderns have spread over the origin and meaning of the state. For what
can the state mean to us, if not the means of setting the previously
described process of society in motion and guaranteeing its unobstructed
continuation? However strong the sociable urges of the individual might
be, only the iron clamp of the state can force huge masses into such a
strong cohesion that the chemical separation of society, with its new pyr¬
amidal structure, has to take place. But what is the source of this sudden
power of the state, the aim of which lies far beyond the comprehension
and egoism of the individual? How did the slave, the blind mole of
culture, come about ? The Greeks have given us a hint with their instinct
for the law of nations that, even at the height of their civilization and
humanity, never ceased to shout from lips of iron such phrases as ‘the
defeated belong to the victor, together with his wife and child, goods and
blood. Power (Gewalt) gives the first right, and there is no right that is not
fundamentally presumption, usurpation and violence’.

Here again we see the degree to which nature, in order to bring society
about, uses pitiless inflexibility to forge for herself the cruel tool of the
state - namely that conqueror with the iron hand who is nothing but
the objectification of the instinct indicated. The onlooker feels, from the
indefinable greatness and power of such conquerors, that they are just the
means of an intention revealing itself through them and yet concealing
itself from them. It is as though a magic will emanated from them, so curi¬
ously swiftly do weaker powers gravitate to them, so wonderfully do they
transform themselves, when that avalanche of violence suddenly swells,
and enter into a state of affinity not present till then, enchanted by that
creative kernel.

If we now see how, in no time at all, the subjected hardly bother about
the dreadful origin of the state, so that basically history informs us less
well about the way those sudden, violent, bloody and at least in one
aspect inexplicable usurpations came about than about any other kind of

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event: if, on the contrary, hearts swell involuntarily towards the magic of
the developing state, with the inkling of an invisibly deep intention, where
calculating reason can only see the sum total of forces: if the state now is
actually viewed enthusiastically as the aim and goal of the sacrifices and
duties of the individual: then all this indicates how enormously necessary
the state is, without which nature might not succeed in achieving, through
society, her salvation in appearance [im Scheine], in the mirror of genius.
How much knowledge does not man’s instinctive pleasure in the state
overcome! One should really assume that a person investigating the emer¬
gence of the state would, from then on, seek salvation only at an awe¬
struck distance from it; and where we do not see monuments to its
development, devastated lands, ruined towns, savage men, consuming
hatred of nations! The state, of ignominious birth, a continually flowing
source of toil for most people, frequently the ravishing flame of the
human race - and yet, a sound that makes us forget ourselves, a battle-cry
that has encouraged countless truly heroic acts, perhaps the highest and
most revered object for the blind, egoistic mass which wears the strange
expression of greatness on its face only at tremendous moments in the life
of the state!

We must, however, construe the Greeks, in relation to the unique
zenith of their art, as being a priori ‘political men par excellence and actu¬
ally history knows of no other example of such an awesome release of the
political urge, of such a complete sacrifice of all other interests in
the service of this instinct towards the state - at best, we could honour the
men of the Renaissance in Italy with the same title, by way of comparison
and for similar reasons. This urge is so overcharged amongst the Greeks
that it continually and repeatedly starts to rage against itself, sinking its
teeth into its own flesh. This bloody jealousy of one town for another, one
party for another, this murderous greed of those petty wars, the tiger-like
triumph over the corpse of the slain enemy, in short, the continual
renewal of those Trojan battle-scenes and atrocities which Homer, stand¬
ing bef ore us as a true Hellene, contemplated with deep relish - what does
this naive barbarism of the Greek state indicate, and what will be its
excuse at the throne of eternal justice? The state appears bef ore it proudly
and calmly: leading the magnificently blossoming woman, Greek society,
by the hand. For this Helen, he waged those wars - what grey-bearded
judge would condemn this 5 ? -

5 llliacl III. 14611.
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It is through this mysterious connection that we sense here between the
state and art, political greed and artistic creation, battlefield and work of
art, that, as I said, we understand the state only as the iron clamp pro¬
ducing society by force: whereas without the state, in the natural bellum
omnium contra omnes, b society is completely unable to grow roots in any
significant measure and beyond the family sphere. Now, after states have
been founded everywhere, that urge of bellum omnium contra omnes is con¬
centrated, from time to time, into dreadf ul clouds of war between nations
and, as it were, discharges itself in less frequent but all the stronger bolts
of thunder and flashes of lightning. But in the intervals, the concentrated
effect of that bellum , turned inwards, gives society time to germinate and
turn green everywhere, so that it can let the radiant blossoms of genius
sprout forth as soon as warmer days come.

With regard to the political Hellenic world, I will not remain silent
about those present-day phenomena in which I believe I detect danger¬
ous signs of atrophy in the political sphere, equally worrying for art and
society. If there were to be men placed by birth, as it were, outside the
instinct for nation and state, who thus have to recognize the state only to
the extent they conceive it to be in their own interest: then such men
would necessarily imagine the state’s ultimate aim as being the most
undisturbed co-existence possible of great political communities, in
which they, above all, would be permitted by everyone to pursue their
own purposes without restriction. With this idea in their heads, they will
promote that policy that offers greatest security to these interests, whilst
it is unthinkable that, contrary to their intentions, they should sacrifice
themselves to the state purpose, led perhaps by an unconscious instinct,
unthinkable because they lack precisely that instinct. All other citizens are
in the dark about what nature intends for them with their state instinct,
and follow blindly; only those who stand outside this know what they want
from the state, and what the state ought to grant them. Therefore it is
practically inevitable that such men should win great influence over the
state, because they may view it as means , whilst all the rest, under the
power of the unconscious intention of the state, are themselves only
means to the state purpose. In order for them to achieve the full effect of
their selfish aims through the medium of the state, it is now, above all,
essential for the state to be completely freed from those terrible, unpre¬
dictable outbreaks of war, so that it can be used rationally; and so, as

6 ‘War of all against all’, cf. Thomas Hobbes, Decive i. 12; Leviathan , ch. XIII.

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consciously as possible, they strive for a state of affairs where war is
impossible. To this end, they first have to cutoff and weaken the specifi¬
cally political impulses as much as possible and, by establishing large state
bodies of equal importance with mutual safeguards, make a successful
attack on them, and therefore war in general, extremely unlikely: whilst
on the other hand they try to wrest the decision over war and peace away
from the individual rulers, so that they can then appeal to the egoism of
the masses, or their representatives: to do which they must in turn slowly
dissolve the monarchical instincts of the people. They carry out this
intention through the widest dissemination of the liberal-optimistic
world view, which has its roots in the teachings of the French
Enlightenment and Revolution i.e. in a completely un-Germanic, gen¬
uinely Romanesque, flat and unmetaphysical philosophy. I cannot help
seeing, above all, the effects of the fear of war in the dominant movement
of nationalities at the present time, and in the simultaneous spread of uni¬
versal suffrage, indeed, I cannot help seeing those truly international,
homeless, financial recluses as really those whose fear stands behind these
movements, who, with their natural lack of state instinct, have learnt to
misuse politics as an instrument of the stock exchange, and state and
society as an apparatus for their own enrichment. The only counter¬
measure to the threatened deflection of the state purpose towards money
matters from this quarter is war and war again: in the excitement of which
at least so much becomes clear, that the state is not founded on fear of the
war-demon, as a protective measure for egoistic individuals, but instead
produces from within itself an ethical momentum in the love for father-
land and prince, indicating a much lof tier designation. If I point to the use
of revolutionary ideas in the service of a self-seeking, stateless money
aristocracy as a dangerous characteristic of the contemporary political
scene, and if, at the same time, I regard the massive spread of liberal opti¬
mism as a result of the fact that the modern money economy has fallen
into strange hands, and if I view all social evils, including the inevitable
decline of the arts, as either sprouting from that root or enmeshed with
it: then you will just have to excuse me if I occasionally sing a paean to war.
His silver bow might sound terrifying; but even if he does swoop in like
the night , 7 he is still Apollo, the just god who consecrates and purifies the
state. But first, as at the beginning of the Iliad , he shoots his arrows at
mules and dogs. Then he actually hits people and, everywhere, pyres with

‘The Greek State’

corpses blaze. So let it be said that war is as much a necessity for the state
as the slave for society: and who can avoid this conclusion if he honestly
inquires as to the reasons why Greek artistic perfection has never been
achieved again?

Whoever considers war, and its uniformed potential, the military pro¬
fession , in connection with the nature of the state as discussed so far, has
to conclude that through war, and in the military profession, we are pre¬
sented with a type, even perhaps the archetype of the state. Here we see,
as the most general effect of the war tendency, the immediate separation
and division of the chaotic masses into military castes, from which there
arises the construction of a ‘war-like society’ in the shape of a pyramid on
the broadest possible base: a slave-like bottom stratum. The unconscious
purpose of the whole movement forces every individual under its yoke,
and even among heterogeneous natures produces, as it were, a chemical
transformation of their characteristics until they are brought into affinity
with that purpose. In the higher castes, it becomes a little clearer what is
actually happening with this inner process, namely the creation of the
military genius - whom we have already met as original founder of the
state. In several states, for example in Sparta’s Lycurgian constitution , 8
we can clearly make out the imprint of that original idea of the state, the
creation of the military genius. If we now think of the original military
state, alive with activity, engaged in its proper ‘work’, and picture for our¬
selves the whole technique of war, we cannot avoid correcting our con¬
cepts of ‘dignity of man’, ‘dignity of work’, absorbed from all around us,
by asking whether the concept of dignity is appropriate for work which
has, as its purpose, the destruction of the ‘dignified’ man, or for the man
to whom such ‘dignified work’ is entrusted, or if, in view of the warlike
mission of the state, those concepts do not rather cancel each other out as
being mutually contradictory. I would have thought the war-like man was
a means for the military genius and that his work was, again, just a means
for the same genius; and that a degree of dignity applies to him, not as
absolute man and non-genius, but as means of genius - who can even
choose his own destruction as a means to the masterpiece which is war, -
that dignity, then, of being acknowledged as worthy to be a means for genius.
But what I have demonstrated here, with a single example, is valid in the
most general sense: every man, with his whole activity, is only dignified

For a brief, elementary discussion of the ‘Lycurgian constitution’, cf. ch. 5 of The
Emergence 0 f Greek Democracy 800-400 BC by W. G. Forrest (1966).

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to the extent that he is a tool of genius, consciously or unconsciously;
whereupon we immediately deduce the ethical conclusion that ‘man as
such’, absolute man, possesses neither dignity, nor rights, nor duties: only
as a completely determined being, serving unconscious purposes, can
man excuse his existence.

Plato’s perfect state is, according to these considerations, certainly
something even greater than is believed by his warmest-blooded admirers
themselves, to say nothing of the superior smirk with which our
‘historically’-educated reject such a fruit of antiquity. The actual aim of
the state, the Olympian existence and constantly renewed creation and
preparation of the genius, compared with whom everything else is just a
tool, aid and facilitator, is discovered here through poetic intuition and
described vividly. Plato saw beyond the terribly mutilated Herm of con¬
temporary state life, and still saw something divine inside it . 9 He believed
that one could, perhaps, extract this divine image, and that the angry, bar-
barically distorted exterior did not belong to the nature of the state: the
whole fervour and loftiness of his political passion threw itself onto that
belief, that wish - he was burnt up in this fire. The fact that he did not
place genius, in its most general sense, at the head of his perfect state, but
only the genius of wisdom and knowledge, excluding the inspired artist
entirely from his state, was a rigid consequence of the Socratic judgment
on art, which Plato, struggling against himself, adopted as his own. This
external, almost accidental gap ought not to prevent us from recognizing,
in the total concept of the Platonic state, the wonderfully grand hiero¬
glyph of a profound secret study of the connection between state and genius,
eternally needing to be interpreted: in this preface we have said what we
believe we have fathomed of this secret script. -

9 Nietzsche conflates two things here: (a) the incident of the mutilation of the herms
(reported in Thucydides VI. 2yff.), and (b) Alcibiades’ panegyric on Socrates at the end
of Plato’s Symposium (22idi-222a6).

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